Winds of change

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

At a meeting of stae regulators I attended, they talked about the enviromental issues that this technology causes . 
They nclude serious noise issues, hazards to birds and bats and lots of NBM (not by me) protests.

Dave

________________________________________
From: Robert J. Berger [rberger () ibd com]
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:22 AM
To: Dewayne Hendricks; David Farber
Subject: Winds of change

Winds of change
The U.S. can greatly boost clean wind power for 2 cents a day. Now all
we need is a president who won't blow the chance.

By Joseph Romm

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/17/wind_power/

May 17, 2008 | A stunning new report just issued by the Bush
administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household,
Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030. That would:

• Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25
percent in 2030.
• Reduce natural gas use by 11 percent.
• Reduce cumulative water consumption associated with electricity
generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030.
• Support roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S.

The report doesn't mention that this would require adopting policies
the Bush administration opposes. But that's what elections are for.

Wind power is coming of age. In 2007, some 20,000 megawatts of wind
were installed globally, enough to power 6 million homes. Sadly, most
wind power manufacturers are no longer American, thanks to decades of
funding cuts by conservatives. Still, new wind is poised to be a
bigger contributor to U.S. (and global) electricity generation than
new nuclear power in the coming decades. As I have written earlier,
concentrated solar power could be an even bigger power source, and it
can even share power lines with wind.

That means we can realistically envision an electric grid built around
renewables: electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions, no fuel cost
(and no future price volatility) and no radioactive waste. But while
it is poised to happen, and other governments are working hard to
claim market share, America will need a bold president to ensure
leadership in these major job-creating industries of the 21st century.

Like solar thermal, wind energy has a long history. More than 2,000
years ago, simple windmills were used in China to pump water and in
Persia and the Middle East to grind grain. Merchants and returning
veterans of the Crusades introduced windmills to Europe in the 11th
century, where first the Dutch and then the English improved the
design. By the 18th century, more than 10,000 windmills operated in
the Netherlands, where they were used to grind grain, pump water and
saw wood. Ultimately the mills were replaced by steam engines because
they could not compete with the low cost, convenience and reliability
of fossil fuels. In America, windmills were widely used in the West by
the end of the 1800s, providing water for irrigation and electricity
for isolated farmers.

While wind has not been able to compete with large central-station
electric power plants for most of this century, it began to see a
resurgence in the 1970s because of the energy crises and government
support. Those wind turbines, however, were crude derivatives from
airplane propellers and were noisy and inefficient. Over the past
quarter-century, significant aerodynamic improvements in blade design
have largely solved both problems and brought down the cost of
electricity from wind power by 10 percent a year (until recently).
Wind energy can now be captured efficiently over a broad range of wind
speeds and direction. Turbines, now placed where the wind is constant,
have been scaled up from 35 kilowatt models of the early 1980s to 2
megawatts (2,000 kilowatts). Better weather forecasting and computer
modeling allow much more confident predictions of wind availability 24
hours ahead of time.

With major government investments in wind in the 1970s, the U.S. was
poised to be a dominant player in what was clearly going to be one of
the biggest job-creating industries of the next 100 years. As late as
the mid 1980s, we had over 85 percent of the world's global installed
capacity, and U.S. companies possessed the most critical knowledge
about how to develop wind farms cost-effectively.

President Reagan cut the renewable energy budget more than 80 percent
after he took office, and eliminated the wind investment tax credit in
1986. His administration saw wind power, clean energy and energy
conservation as "Jimmy Carter" strategies, and, like most
conservatives, Reagan opposed government-led programs to promote
alternative energy. This was pretty much the death of most of the U.S.
wind industry.

<snip>

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